Monthly Archives: January 2005

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Here's the problem with wall-to-wall coverage of an election, any election  watching people vote is boring. So is watching people wait in line to vote and watching people discuss their voting experience.

I saw a reporter explaining the set-up of a particular polling place (for example: how many voting booths there were). Who cares?

Slightly sweet but tart and available in the aromas of blackberry, raspberry and cherry, the beer  called B-to-the-E  is marketed toward "active 21- to 27-year old experimenters looking for new tastes and options."

B-to-the-E.

If that's the name the company selected, I can only imagine the rejects.

Think Tanker: Metrosexu-ale!

It's always funny when corporations try to appeal to youth.

Remember when in the early 90s, Sprite suddenly became the soda of black people? All Sprite commercials soon featured either basketball players or rappers.

When I visited Salem, OR two years ago, I met a frat boy who had a 3"x5" Miller High Life logo tattooed on his back.

A highly diverse line up of musicians are joining together for the upcoming tsunami relief charity single "Forever In Our Hearts." The project is being led by Jason Miller of Godhead and features a wide variety of artists performing on the song. So far, Miller and producer Jay Baumgardner have brought in the likes of Brian McKnight, Mya, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., Jacoby Shaddix of Papa Roach and Nate Dogg to provide vocals for the song.

Laying down the guitar parts on the song were Miller and his brother Mike Miller, as well as ex-Evanescence member Ben Moody and Trapt guitarist Simon Ormandy. Drummers Josh Freese of A Perfect Circle and Jane's Addiction's Stephen Perkins both provide percussion. P-Nut of 311 and Papa Roach's Tobin Esperance both play bass on the song.

However, the most impressive group of contributors show up on the song's chorus. Among the many voices heard on "Forever In Our Hearts" are former Sixpence None The Richer singer Leigh Nash, Extreme's Nuno Bettencourt and Gary Cherone, Mitch Allan of SR-71, members of Static-X, Lit, Veruca Salt and Adema. A handful of actors also chime in, including Eric Roberts, Ming Na, and former child star/Goonie/Ninja Turtle voice Corey Feldman.

And I thought Dan Aykroyd's participation in "We Are the World" was strange…

SCARBOROUGH: Hollywood has a long history of embracing cop killer causes. Michael, I have got to ask you. I don't understand it. Middle America doesn't understand it. What is it about cop killers?

SCARBOROUGH: I was in Philadelphia in 2000 for the GOP convention. And they had all of these protesters out praising a convicted cop killer. Of course, I speak of Mumia Abu-Jamal. And it's just absolutely sickening. Talk about some of the Hollywood stars, again, who are embracing this convicted cop killer. And what do all of the stars see in cop killers that attracts them so much?

MICHAEL SMERCONISH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Joe, I have got in front of me an ad that was run in The New York Times in the mid-90s in which they took out a full-page ad and it listed all of their names. And I'm talking about people like Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover. I'm also talking Alec Baldwin, Ed Asner, Mike Farrell, Whoopi Goldberg, Spike Lee, Tim Robbins. It's the whole group of them. Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys held a concert in North Jersey at the Byrne Arena that unfortunately was a sellout. That's how sick this thing got.

SCARBOROUGH: It's a disgrace. I'm sorry. It's a disgrace the way Hollywood has embraced this Mumia clown. It's a disgrace the way they embrace cop killers. They do. They have got their reasons. I don't understand them. And I know most of middle America doesn't either.

Joe Scarborough  spokesman for half of America.

I wonder if there's a career field whose agents people wouldn't mind seeing fall victim to murder with the intent to kill.

Would middle America understand the killing of, say, telemarketers? If Body Count released a song called "Meter Maid Killer," would our country be outraged?

This week is "Get Tested" week at UCLA. It is also Islam Awareness Week. Both seek to inform people about deadly killers.

[pause]

I'm sorry. That was inappropriate. Ethnic jokes are not funny.

As punishment, I shall blindfold myself with floss and comb my pubes in search of a penis.

The 1/31 Globe features a picture of [Chyna] sitting down after peeing on herself.

Adam Robot:Maybe she stepped on a jellyfish.

Fuck Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes. On this site, we obsess over Joanie Laurer.

Sure, Britney walked into a gas station restroom barefoot, but Chyna (while being filmed for television sitting on a couch naked using a pair of headphones to cover her nipples) argued incoherently with her ex-wrestler-boyfriend about whether she blew pot smoke into his nine-year-old daughter's face.

At televised sporting events, fans often display signs that incorporate the call letters of the network broadcasting the event they're at.

For example, at one point during the NFC championship game on Fox, I saw an Eagles fan holding a sign that read "End oFOur heX."

Moreover, I saw a Steelers fan at the AFC championship game on CBS with a sign that read "Can Ben Stopthrowinginterceptions?"

Okay, I made that one up.

Anyway, these quasi-acronym signs make me wish that sporting events would air on QVC or C-SPAN2. You know, challenge the fans.

Fans also frequently hold up cutouts of the letter "D" and a picket fence.

"D"-fence. Get it?

I wish they'd be more creative though.

Are there any non-black people named Deion?

Tim Goodman in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Didn't being the host of a late night talk show used to mean something? Back in Carson's day, nobody could topple the king. Even trying to compete with him was seen as folly. He was the man in the chair, period. When he sat behind that desk and talked with an odd assemblage of stars and experts and ordinary people, it was an event, a nightly ritual. It was part of the fabric of our popular culture.

Nowadays Craig Ferguson can have a talk show.

I keep hearing about how Johnny Carson was a "good man" and it makes me wonder what people will say when O.J. Simpson dies.

Every March, the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles holds its annual William S. Paley Television Festival. For two weeks, the small screen's finest of the past and present are saluted with panels that feature cast and crew in person.

In the past three years, the Paley Festival has conducted panels for Futurama, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Undeclared, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Scrubs, Six Feet Under, 24, The OC and Arrested Development, to name a few.

This year's panels include: The Law & Order "brand," Desperate Housewives, Lost and In Living Color.

I hope MC Chris will attend but I'm told he's performing that night in Toledo, OH (wherever that is).

Tickets are $25 plus $35 for a Museum membership. Members get to purchase advance tickets and tickets always sell out quickly.

Is Adult Swim worth $60 to me?

One reason Survivor will always be better than The Apprentice is teams that consistently lose on Survivor don't have to re-pack luggage every few days before elimination sessions. Packing is teh worst.

Thursday night, anti-Bush protestors convened outside the Federal Building, snarling traffic in the area. Police shut down half of Westwood. On my way home, I asked the bus driver to let me off so I could actually get someplace.

I saw two cars on their way to the protest. Both were garishly decorated with duct tape and paint pens and flyers taped to doors. I imagine the protestor parking lot looked like a political gay pride parade.

The driver of the second clown car I saw kept honking his horn in morse code and simultaneously waving his free arm through the sunroof of his car. I'm pretty sure he irritated everyone stuck in traffic around him.

[sigh]

Embarrassing liberals continue to ruin the ideology for the rest of us.

I saw this press photo for American Idol on Yahoo!:

Besides lousy rendering, it looks like Randy is the only person who actually showed up at the photo shoot.

Whoever picked "Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums" by A Perfect Circle for use in the trailer should be fired.

First of all, the song is not very good. It's a poor man's Trent Reznor remix of the APC song "Pet."

Secondly, the song does not build excitement like, for example, the choir music in the Spider-Man 2 trailer.

Thirdly, the song is defiantly political in nature and features a video with stick children, oil wells, dripping blood, the word "sheep," Dubya on horseback, and Dubya dispensing propaganda in the form of ice cream cones, meat grinders and television sets.

Granted, cruise ship commercials used "Lust for Life," Iggy Pop's ode to heroin, but that song at least fit well and didn't suck.

[pause]

All this typing has made me hungry for some afternoon delight.

It seems like every comic book film nowadays must include a shot of a superhero throwing and/or upending a car.

Paging Dr. Freud! At 11:59, with word of an incoming missile strike, Jack stares at a tunnel and thinks about his lover.

During the telecast of the Patriots/Colts game on Sunday, one of the announcers remarked that Corey Dillon couldn't truly appreciate his success in New England without having spent seven miserable years in Cincinnati.

I'm sure Kiefer Sutherland feels the same way.

He's probably relieved to have risen above this period of his career:

I wish I had taped last night's episode of Couples Fear Factor so I could share with everybody.

For the third challenge, the man stuck his head inside a plastic tunnel and had his hands cuffed to the outer sides of the tunnel. The woman had to retrieve a key inside the tunnel and then free her man. The catch was that every few seconds, a deluge of raw sewage would surge down the tunnel.

This one woman retrieved the key and then lost it in the sewage receptacle, forcing her man to remain stuck in the tunnel for another two minutes getting pounded in the face with raw sewage. The footage was hilarious.

The Mars Volta's latest single "The Widow" is currently the most played and most requested song on influential Los Angeles radio station KROQ. Expect to hear it in your area soon. What else did KROQ recently add to its rotation? "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" by The Arcade Fire. Haha.

Adam Robot:MLK should have worked harder, that way this would have been a holiday everyone gets off

I first saw the trailer for Coach Carter in front of Team America: World Police.

Since then, I have seen (among other things) Samuel L. Jackson pretend to coach two gamers on the Spike TV Video Game Awards, Samuel L. Jackson sit in ESPN's Budweiser Hot Seat, Samuel L. Jackson count down his favorite music videos on BET, and a Coach Carter countdown of the top basketball movies of all time on MTV in addition to a barrage of promotional clips.

Well, it worked.

Coach Carter debuted at number one this weekend with a gross of $29.2 million. It is the third MTV film released in January to debut at number one. The other two were Varsity Blues in 1999 and Save the Last Dance in 2001.

January is usually the month during which studios burn off movies they don't expect to succeed.

Not so for MTV.

To them, apparently, with enough aggressive imprinting, any January movie can be a hit.

The only early first quarter MTV film to flop was last year's The Perfect Score, probably because it was released on February 1 instead of in January and did not feature a main cast with either one black person amidst a bunch of white people or one white person amidst a bunch of black people. The inclusion of that Asian pothead to the group disrupted the balance of one black and four white.

MTV is not hopeless. They released Election and Better Luck Tomorrow and Jackass: The Movie, all of which I enjoyed. However, I cannot bear another winter break with the network shoving a lame movie in my face. Please, MTV, either stop making January movies or let your January movies die January deaths.

Yesterday, I pitched a series to Fuse on which contributors to the Elektra soundtrack and the line-up of the Taste of Chaos tour compete in a tournament to find out who the most embarrassingly awful band in the world is.

Those of you who tuned in to the season premiere of 24 this week witnessed Lukas Haas' return to relevance.

Eleven years after playing the title role in Witness opposite Harrison Ford, Haas appeared in Mars Attacks!. At the end of the film, he receives a medal, just as Ford did in Star Wars. Ford receives his medal from Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher. Haas receives his medal from Natalie Portman, who would go on to play Princess Leia's mother, Queen Amidala.

In the mid-90s, Marvel Comics and DC Comics collaborated on a line of comic books called Amalgam Comics, which featured characters who were combinations of established Marvel and DC characters. For example, Dark Claw was a combination of Batman and Wolverine.

In February, Marvel Comics will resurrect Amalgam Comics with a new partner  Twentieth Century Fox  whose film division produced such Marvel films as X-Men and Daredevil and will release Elektra and Fantastic Four this year.

Adam Riff has obtained exclusive panels from the debut issue of the new Amalgam Comics' flagship title: